All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  When I say Courtney was pretty, I don’t mean that she was one of those skinny sylphs who came to school in teeny-tiny skirts on the coldest of days. She was muscular. She rarely wore makeup. Her smooth brown hair fell into place on its own, and her clothes all fit her just so. There was always some soft-spoken boy trailing after her—the shyer members of the lacrosse and soccer teams all loved her—but she only wanted to be friends with them. She liked a different type of guy.

  She invited me to come along to a party—an unprecedented offer—and I yipped out a “yes!,” then tried to gin up some nonchalance after the fact. This was early December. We’d played our first game that week, an easy win (to which I had contributed two rebounds in two minutes of playing time), and I was giddy as we sallied out in our mom’s car, a Ford Taurus a.k.a. the Fortrus. First we drove to Courtney’s friend Tanya’s house, and I moved to the backseat, and there in Tanya’s driveway we puzzled over the Montgomery County map book resting open on top of the hand brake. Animals strike curious poses, Prince sang as we started for Bethesda. My sister and Tanya talked about boys I didn’t know.

  It was Rob Golden’s house, that is to say Dick Mitchell’s, a big plush colonial, ivy on the outside and fields of chenille and carpet within—fibered surfaces where kids on the brink of a kiss could nestle their wads of gum, and these would lie undiscovered for weeks. Courtney and Tanya and I filed through the house, out the back door and into the yard. It was cold, but half the party had gone out there anyway. A keg sat on the flagstone, among patio furniture, guarded by one of those shy boys who preferred to spend the whole party priming the pump and squirting beer into cups, while around that outpost and its lonely viceroy radiated fleeting colonies of young bodies, moving erratically, huddling for a while and then breaking apart.

  Tanya peeled off to go talk to some friends of hers, and Courtney kept several paces ahead of me. I could tell she wasn’t sure whether it’d been a good idea to bring me along. I looked around the yard and saw only one other sophomore, a promiscuous Deadhead who liked to get high and then let some lucky boy deprive her of her tie-dyed togs. She was sitting up on a stone wall at the edge of the yard, in a row of girls who were swinging their legs and holding their red plastic cups with two hands, like bouquets, while swains in baseball caps lined up below them. In the moonlight the girls reared their heads and ran their fingers through their hair.

  Aside from that one girl they were all juniors and seniors, people I had never seen at night. Their faces were painted over with shadows. They looked like bears and squirrels and dogs. I drifted across the yard, craning my neck as though I were looking for someone.

  “There you are,” a guy said, and I turned to face a person I didn’t know, though I knew his name, Greg, as I knew the names of all the upperclassmen. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “It’s true, though,” I said desperately.

  “You are someone else?”

  “I am here.”

  He nodded solemnly.

  On the other side of a bush something rustled, and a security light went on. Greg was taller than I was, but not by much, with straight brown bangs and a blunt nose, and the pale skin and slight doughiness of someone who spent his daylight hours away from the daylight. His face was taunting and dappled.

  “Did you crash this fiesta?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of. Were there, like, invitations?”

  “Engraved. Delivered by footmen.”

  “I came with my sister. Courtney,” I said.

  “Courtney Atherton? You’re her sister?”

  “’Tis true.”

  He peered at my face, and I mugged for him, tucking my chin.

  “Okay, I can see it,” he said. “Wow. Amazing.”

  “How is that amazing?”

  “She’s just, like, an intense person.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “She’s so—literal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He told me his first and last name, Greg Jacobs. On a whim I lied about my own name. I said it was Becca.

  Inside, someone had put a record on, and through the patio doors I could see boys thrusting their shoulders forward and back, chanting the words to “It’s Tricky.”

  On the patio itself, five or six weight-room regulars were in heated discussion. One of the guys clapped his hands slowly and repeated, “Let’s do this, let’s do this.” A more prudent one said, “That’s foolish, y’all.” Then the one who’d been clapping abruptly pulled off his T-shirt. His muscles and his gut bulged. Jay Wood was his name, a.k.a. Woody, or Woody Woodpecker, or Good Wood, or just Wood, said pointedly—Good morning, Wood. All those boner jokes had done nothing to sweeten his personality.

  Greg cocked his head toward the boys. “Some guy keyed Ben Sachs’s Volvo, that’s what they’re upset about.”

  “Who?”

  “I think they said he goes to Landon.”

  “Is it Ben’s car or his parents’ car?”

  Greg didn’t know. “Hey, isn’t your dad the one at basketball games who—”

  “I should probably go look for Courtney,” I said.

  “Nice meeting you, little sister.”

  In the kitchen I saw Rasheeda, our point guard, who waved and called out my name but had nothing much to say to me, nor I to her. We cast our eyes around the room and back at each other and exchanged speechless smiles.

  I went looking for the bathroom, just to give myself a purpose, then returned to the kitchen. My sister’s legs appeared on the back stairs, negotiating one step at a time. She was gripping the banister with one hand and holding her shoes in the other. Above her stood Rob Golden, studying her progress. He wore a letter jacket and a Duke baseball cap, and he had white tape over one ear. In the weak light I couldn’t make out the flavor of his grin, whether it was affectionate or just amused, but my first impression was that he was curious to see whether she would fall.

  “Hells bells!” she squealed when she saw me. “What are you doing? Are you drinking? Are you having fun?” A cup of beer had found its way into my hands. I didn’t much like the taste, but I was doing my best. I took a gulp. “Yeah!” Courtney cheered. Then she said, “This is Rob.” She gestured behind her, unaware of how far away he was, but just then he hopped down after her and handled her from behind. I wanted to pry his fingers off her arms. Then she herself shook loose of him.

  We’ve met before, I wanted to say, but Rob wasn’t looking at me. Close-up, I could see the deep dimple in his chin and the red vessels of his bummed-out eyes. What his disappointment had been about, Courtney explained to me later, on the drive home. Tanya had gone with her friends to another party. I was behind the wheel, even though I had only a learner’s permit and wasn’t supposed to drive after dark, and I went slowly through a maze of curving roads, hounded by headlights bearing down from behind. We had to pull over to consult the Montgomery County map book several times. It was so much darker than when we’d come, and the radio was off, and the meaningless names of suburban courts and circles glowered at us from small signs.

  What Rob wanted, what they all wanted: “Not in a bathroom,” Courtney said. “Uh-uh.”

  Certain boys may have hoped that by removing our hooded sweatshirts they would summon the lacy ladies of Cinemax, but that wasn’t Courtney. Under her sweatshirt were a cotton bra and a complicated heart.

  “Did you see they had those padded toilet seats?” she asked.

  “Yes! Oh my god.”

  “Hey. Do you have any cigarettes?”

  “Um,” I said. “Do we smoke?”

  “Maybe we should stop and get some. Let’s, okay?”

  “I think we’re lost.”

  “Well there’s got to be a 7-Eleven around here somewhere.”

  “Do you think you would … with him?” I asked her.

  The sex talks we’d been given by teachers (not our parents, oh no) leaned heavily on the word special. When a man and a woman hav
e special feelings about each other, they do this special thing with their special parts.

  “He’s very—how should I put this?” She twisted her face up and I knew exactly what she was getting at, or thought I did.

  “Large,” I said. “Humongous.”

  “That’s not a word,” she said.

  “It is!” I said. “I bet he has a humongous cock. A big kielbasa!”

  She lowered her head and shook it back and forth a few times, then brought it back up with a jerk and stared at the road.

  “So what’s up with the tape on his ear?” I asked.

  “It’s something from wrestling. Cauliflower ear.”

  “Is it, like, cauliflower in your ear?”

  “Not actual cauliflower—”

  “One time I had cheeseburger ear, and I had to tape this bun over it—”

  “Seriously, you have got to stop talking about meat. I’m so going to hurl,” she moaned.

  “You are?”

  “Just keep driving. Did you have fun?”

  “I talked to Rasheeda. And this guy Greg.”

  “Greg Jacobs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you talk to him about?”

  “He called you literal.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I told him my name was Becca!” I’d forgotten until then.

  “That’s cute. You’re cute,” she said, as though she’d just come to this conclusion. “Did Greg tell you you were cute?” She leaned her head against the window and then quickly straightened up and opened her eyes very wide. “I’m a dizzy lizzy.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “As soon as we find a 7-Eleven, we can just ask them where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The 7-Eleven!”

  “It’s almost midnight. Mom and Dad said—”

  “They’re so asleep right now. They pretend like they’re waiting up, but they fall asleep.”

  “Dad’s probably up watching TV.”

  “Nope. Asleep.”

  It was so dark. I was afraid I might never find the way home, and that was hardly my only fear. “Do you think something’s going to happen to him?” I asked.

  “Don’t worrrrrry about it.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “I’m just saying. The other people that he used to work with, they’re the ones who did whatever they did.”

  “But we don’t even really know what happened, or what Dad—”

  “There’s nothing else I need to know. It’s like—”

  She moaned again and told me to pull over. “Like, now.” She lunged for the wheel and I had to push her hands away. Before the car had even come to a full stop, she opened the door and threw up neatly into the gutter.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, when we were back on the road.

  “Good thing Mom keeps the Fortrus stocked with Kleenex,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue she’d taken from the glove compartment. “Where the fuck are we?”

  2005

  The girl was bold. I hardly thought Nina would pursue the driving lesson after the night at the club, that is to say her night at the club and my night at Burger King, but the following week Daniel called, to thank me for offering to teach her. I was wary, but I still liked her, and I thought I could be—I want to say of service, though that sounds too grand. She needed someone, not me exactly, but someone older and female and maybe I was as close as she was going to get. I agreed to it. And when I saw her the next Sunday I didn’t feel uneasy any longer. I was all aflutter, in fact. Here she was in crepe-soled creepers, sauntering but bashful, bashful but sauntering, eyeing me with half a smile. A couple of broken leaves were caught in her hair, as though she’d been lying on the ground, and she wore a black peacoat with a torn plaid lining and bright pink pants she’d no doubt found at some vintage place. You could see a small bulge of skin above the waistband, her shirt was so short. Out of breath, coat sleeves pulled down over her fists, carrying an overstuffed backpack, she told me that one of her friends had come out as gay and that one of her teachers had not been at school in two weeks and was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown. Every so often, as if this were an inside joke we already shared, she spoke in the voice of a robot.

  Her fingernails were painted blue and the sidewalks were damp, and we strolled in the direction of Independence Avenue, where I’d parked my father’s car.

  “Last year, I was such a loser,” she told me.

  “No you weren’t.”

  “I was! And this year I’m still a loser, but now I like it.”

  “You’re not a loser.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  I learned that the rectangular object in the outer pocket of her backpack was not an MP3 player but a deck of tarot cards. “I’m learning to tell fortunes,” she said. Then she stopped to pick something up off the ground: a gray moth, with long antennae and a large, furry body.

  “I’m naming him Vince,” she said.

  “Hey Vince, what’re you doing out here in January?”

  “Do you know that moths are messengers? They travel back and forth between this world and the afterlife,” she said. She touched the creature and it rose a few inches, its wings sputtering. I stepped away as it fell back into her hand. She touched it again and this time it dropped to the pavement.

  “Poor Vince,” she said.

  “He’s neither here nor there,” I said.

  But then without another glance downward she skipped ahead.

  “How’s basketball?” I asked.

  “I’ve been riding the bench,” she said cheerfully.

  The sun was on its way out by the time we began the lesson. An irony here was that I was known in my family as a poor driver: lead-footed, heedless of posted limits, a reaper of citations. Nor am I a natural teacher. Okay, turn the car on. Pull out. Stay in the lane. All my instructions took as their premise that she already knew how to operate the vehicle. Which she basically did, at least she was easier on the pedals than I was. Slowly she drove the car toward the stop sign at the end of the block, halting twice before we reached it, once because of a branch in the road she’d mistaken for a squirrel, and then some ten feet before the intersection, braking prematurely. I kept the radio off the same way my father had kept the radio off when I first learned to drive—though after one lesson in which I proved a less careful student than my older sister, he’d outsourced the job to an unflinching and deadpan instructor from Washington Driving School, who taught via sarcastic suggestion: you might want to try stopping before the stop sign next time.

  Nina checked the mirrors every few seconds. And then we passed through an intersection, pleasure overcame her, and she said, “I’m driving!”

  Because it was Dad’s car, and I hadn’t told him why I was borrowing it, I was especially cautious. First I directed Nina to a supermarket parking lot to practice, but there were so many shoppers and little children barely over bumper-height, and Nina was looking every which way, not at the shoppers and their kids but at entrances and exits and occupied cars. She was at an age when the world is small and run-ins are common, and you are always hunting for your classmates, your crushes.

  But there we were, and we drove on, the river to our left with its drowned garbage and fallen tree limbs, the parkway below, a cloud-blanket drifting slowly to the east. People were pitched forward in the chill. A man in a long coat spit onto the sidewalk. When I’d learned to drive, I couldn’t get out of my head how easy it would have been to kill myself and/or another person with a mere spasm of the wrist. Nina, however, seemed immediately confident.

  I could’ve sworn that no time at all had passed since I had learned to drive, and yet red lights took forever to turn green.

  We drove up into Northwest, and as we neared a playground she said she wanted to take a break. We let ourselves in through a chain-link gate, passed a stone water fountain—the sight of which recalled me to
the smell of playground water fountains I’d drunk from twenty years earlier—and sat on the too-small swings, knees level with our bellies, chomping on Orbit but earthbound, our legs too long.

  I picture us now not beached on a playground swing set but sitting high above the city on hanging platforms, the entire government small beneath us, grit raining from our shoes. She was smart, smarter than I was, she asked me what I thought of artificial intelligence and whether I liked Thoreau, who in her opinion was boring, and whether I believed in an afterlife and what was my take on some band I’d never heard of. Notions rolled out of her in one long stream. To be honest there’s nothing that looks that good to me right now, she said. I used to want to be a professor like my dad used to be but then he became a lawyer. I don’t know, maybe I could be a lawyer. Too many lawyers as it is, I said. But then I saw her face and backtracked and said some of them do cool things.

  “It must be nice to have a sister,” she said.

  “Sisters are hard sometimes.”

  “What’s hard about it?”

  “I don’t know. I have two, and sometimes we get along and sometimes we really don’t.”

  “You mean you fight?”

  “It’s not even fighting. It’s that you’re bound to this person who you would probably never otherwise be friends with. And you bring out the worst in each other a lot more than you bring out the best in each other. My older sister still thinks that she knows better than me about everything.”

  “So do you wish she wasn’t your sister?”

  “I might as well wish that I’m not me.”

  Nina and I slid slowly from the swings and walked out of the park. My phone tickled my thigh, and it was a text from Rob.

  Whassup?

  I’m with Nina. My high school girl